Discrepant representations of multi-Asian Leicester: institutional discourse and everyday life in the ‘model’ multicultural city

Abstract

The city of Leicester has had undoubted success in managing ethnic diversity since the 1980s, and has been lauded as a model of ‘community cohesion’. Explaining the dynamics underlying this, Singh (2006) argues that the ‘serendipitous’ convergence of East African Asian social capital, and the stable local rule of a Labour Party group committed to diversity, ‘gradually produced a virtuous cycle’. However, based upon an original study of writing about British Asian diasporas in Leicester since the 1960s, this research paper offers a deliberately more contested re-narration of the model multicultural city and its making. Qualifying institutional narratives of ‘success’, I first interrogate the accounts of Leicester City Council and the local evening newspaper, the Leicester Mercury. My argument is that there has been a shift from indifference and rejection in the 1970s, through celebratory co-option, containment and commodification in the 1980s and 1990s, to much greater critical scrutiny of Leicester’s dominant discourse of civic unity from the mid-2000s. Against the backdrop of key neighbourhoods below the scale of the city, I also re-evaluate the ‘back-stories’ of Asian Leicester which are typically obscured by the institutional emphasis on ‘success’. My argument is that more contested accounts of everyday ‘lived experience of a locality’ (Brah 1996: 192) begin to emerge in oral history of Ugandan Asian expellees struggle to recover their middle-class status, ethnography of the tactical engagement of Asian community leaders and activists with council efforts to incorporate them, and novels which chart young British Asians’ often vehement critiques of persisting ethno-religious polarization at the grassroots.